Empires of tourism: travel and rhetoric in Italian colonial Libya and Albania, 1911-1943

This article examines the constitutive relationships between tourism and colonialism in Italy's first and last Mediterranean colonies - Libya and Albania - during the early twentieth century. It attends to the ways that tourism was positioned as a colonizing strategy in each; a practice that came to fruition in Libya but remained in a nascent state in Albania due to the Second World War and fascism's end. This article also brings into relief the moment that ideology is conjured into being, or what Edward Said has described as the 'preposterous transition' from text to practice. I show how the trope of romanita ('Romanness') was actualized through the practices of Italian colonial tourists in Libya. The successes of tourism there made for the framing of Albania through ospitalita ('hospitality'), or in the very language of tourism itself. By exploring the historical interactions between colonial rhetoric and touristic praxis, I intend to tease out the connective tissue between tourism, colonialism, and imperial formations - one filament being that Italian colonial tourists, conditioned to the pleasures of Empire, were more open to new forms of cultural imperialism predicated on consumerism, mobility, and leisure - the very stuff of tourism - that emerged in the post-war era.